(The Associated Press circulated the following article by Jim Abrams on August 15.)
WASHINGTON — For three years, lawmakers who believe welfare recipients should work more have been thwarted by their inability to get Congress to work better.
At the end of June, Congress passed the 10th short-term extension of the 1996 welfare law that ended decades of guaranteed assistance and imposed work requirements on adults receiving welfare.
The extension, running through the end of September, keeps the old law, which technically expired in 2002, operating while the House and Senate grapple over very different ideas concerning spending, added work requirements and access to day care and health care.
Keeping dying programs alive through extensions is hardly unusual. It took 12 extensions before Congress passed the $286.4 billion highway and transit bill that President Bush signed into law last week.
The old transportation bill, funded at $218 billion, expired in September 2003. Its extensions came at a heavy cost. Money was distributed at the older, lower rate and, without the authorization of a new bill, states were restricted in initiating new building projects or safety programs.
Conceptually, Congress runs government programs through a two-step process. First the authorizing committees – agriculture, education, energy or defense – write legislation outlining programs and setting spending guidelines. Then the appropriation committees write spending bills spelling out how much money specific programs get every year.
But it doesn’t always work that smoothly because some authorizing bills seldom, if ever, get reauthorized. Often that’s because Republicans and Democrats – or the House and Senate, or Congress and the White House – can’t agree on how to revamp the old law.
One major consequence has been that the 28 senators and 66 House members who as appropriators are supposed to pay the bills but not write the laws now have considerable more power and control over the process.
Sarah Binder, a political science professor at George Washington University and analyst at the Brookings Institution, said this has been the trend for more than a decade. She blamed “ideological differences that have made it difficult for these (authorizing) committees to assert their authority.”
This varies among committees, she said. The House and Senate Armed Services panels, backed by strong security and economic interests, have no problem getting defense authorization bills passed every year. The foreign relations committees, lacking a natural constituency, face far greater obstacles.
The last time Congress passed a foreign aid authorization bill was in 1985. Lawmakers have focused on more narrowly tailored bills, such as the administration-backed global AIDS relief act and the Millennium Challenge program of aid for selected developing countries.
Congress went from 1979 to 2002 without reauthorizing Justice Department activities. The House Judiciary Committee in July approved legislation extending department programs through 2009 and making changes in how the department issues grants.
The committee also increased the chances the Senate will go along by including a reauthorization of the popular Violence Against Women Act, which expires in September.
Lawmakers are also trying to instill new life in other established programs:
_The House voted in July to reauthorize NASA for the first time since 2000. Uncertainty after the Columbia shuttle disaster of 2003 was one reason for the delay, but the Science Committee now is pushing legislation to reflect the president’s goals of future missions to the moon and Mars.
_The Senate Commerce Committee has approved a bill for Amtrak, last authorized in 2002, that sets down markers for privatization of the money-losing passenger railroad.
_President Bush has urged Congress to make changes in the 40-year-old Head Start program to give states more control. Several Head Start bills have been introduced, but resistance to change is strong.
_The House passed legislation in March to rewrite the 1998 Workforce Investment Act, the federal jobs training program. But language to give participating religious groups more flexibility in hiring practices faces trouble in the Senate.
_Republicans are working to reauthorize the 1970 Clean Air Act and the 1973 Endangered Species Act but face strong opposition from environmental groups and their Democratic allies. Meanwhile, Democrats say it’s time to reauthorize the 1965 Voting Rights Act to root out still-existing discrimination in the election process.